Quote from: BaldricksTrousers on December 10, 2013, 16:00

My reckoning is that they will end up being closed down by getty, just like "Mac" companies get closed by macdonald's.

I don't think stockphotos. com would have any problem from Getty, something like iStockpictures would maybe even iPictures would but I don't see how stockphotos could.  It's too generic a term, the 'i' seems to be the important part.

If I remember correctly, the "i" is only there because someone was sitting on "Stockphotos.com" when Bruce wanted the name, so he stuck "i" for "internet" in front of  the name.  If "i" has become important it seems to be an accident.

Anyway, time will tell. I really don't think this dude will see his quarter-million again.

I've had a private message from an insider at iStock, whom I knew well in the old days. I'm told that Mark's colleagues as inspectors and admins did extend their condolences, individually and as a group, to his family, and that they feel that their feelings and actions are not something to be made public in anonymous forum posts.
My interlocutor clearly felt that stuff written here (probably some of it by me) was inappropriate and hurtful to the inspectors and admins.
I've been told it's ok for me to pass on a precis of what I was told and I hope and believe that was a fair summary.
For myself, while I don't doubt (and have never doubted) the sincere sorrow of Mark's friends in iStock, I still don't really understand why it wasn't announced. If you have a "community" then it is normal to exchange infomation about what is happening with members of that community. That is what "a community" is: a group of people who share.

Quote from: tickstock on December 08, 2013, 20:58

Here's one more new Shutterstock.

http://flippa.com/blog/stockphoto-case-study/

Hmmm. IMO iStock should have bought that domain name.
So that site, which has been going "since 1995 (!)" is selling pics by just one bloke (or am I missing something). I did a couple of searches and each was a number of series of one, two, three etc models with various minor changes in position. (actually, 'Christmas' is more varied)
Wonder if 'cashflow positive' means that he hasn't spent anything after buying the domain name and putting the site together.

Why do I feel a court case coming on?  If your name is McDonald (and there are a lot of them) you can't open McDonald's Seafood Restaurant without getting sued to death, or even sell anything with "Mac" in it.  Istock obviously inserted the "i" because "stockphoto.com" was already taken but it was (I believe) inactive. Paying $250,000 effectively to try to piggyback off Getty Images is not, in my view, a clever move. iStock didn't buy this name in the past and I'd lay odds they'd rather shut it down than pay out a million or two to some dude who thinks he's spotted a quick buck.

I think I'll just go and register McDonalls.com (it's available for $12 if you want it) and sell it to someone for $1,000,000. No problem there!

Quote from: dirkr on December 09, 2013, 14:52

Maybe it's time to leave...

It was time to leave Fotolia many years ago.

And I did.
I don't remember Fotolia doing anything good for photographers, instead they paved the way for some of the most negative developments. I certainly won't weep if they go under and that $87m gets spent elsewhere.

I wonder if he seriously upset someone. Was there a head on row? Was he still an admin/inspector at the end?  It doesn't make sense otherwise.  The iStock forum is almost defunct, 20 threads per month, yet a few of the older members of the community have still picked up the remembrance thread, but Lobo hasn't bothered to offer sympathy, it's crazy. What does that make Lobo look like? What does it make iStock look like?

Well, I'm sorry for saying what I thought, And I'm sorry you couldn't be bothered to send your condolences until you wanted to jump in to defend iStock. And I probably shouldn't have said that either, but it happens to be what I think.

PS: The value of the forum is that it let us know about this, as it lets us know about other things.

Yup. I remember the "wiki-warriors" earning their badges by getting correct keywords deleted and replacing them with incorrect ones, which iStock then approved. It happened to me.  I don't know why anyone would think that someone who has never been near a place where a photo was taken would know better about what it was of than the person who was there and took the photo.
Then there is the local knowledge. I shot some Saudi kabsa today, which is also known as machboos or majbous in Bahrain and Qatar. I doubt if one in a hundred Canadians have heard of it, so how is a Canadian company going to get the correct keywords? Agency keywording is OK for girl, beach, sea, sunglasses, bikini, happy, smiling - but it's not going to work for more complicated stuff. Istock CV proves that, it almost forces people to spam keywords by being so inadequate.

I don't know where the idea came from that "in most stock agency's terms of use the artists are somehow legally protected".  All the terms I read seem to state that the artist indemnifies the agencies and guarantees to fund the agency's legal costs in the event of trouble.
It's never made me feel protected, quite the reverse actually, I seem to be promising to protect them to an unlimited degree. Or have I misunderstood everything?

They took several days to approve my last batches so I found myself facing 119 that all needed finished at once. It really is awful, as bad as wading through the sections on Deep Meta and trying to organise everything.

Don't they ALL turn into that, Tony? And isn't that the point of them? The organisers want the people with most friends to attract attention to their business - at least, that's they usual way it goes. It's about SEO (or sometimes about acquiring copyright) not about photographic skill.

Except I have exactly 75 cleared and it's not showing payment due yet.

Is less than one month "old"? 

I think that in this case two or three weeks is "old" because we are into a different payment cycle.  The thread concerns the November payments (and raking it up after that has been resolved could make people think there is an ongoing problem).